What are the side effects of general anesthetic?
As others have mentioned, do not change what you have been told to do without discussing it with your physicians (and I see it is probably too late to help you, but I am answering anyway for the benefit of anyone else who reads this. The purpose of preoperative fasting is not to prevent nausea and vomiting, but to prevent the aspiration of gastric contents. Depending on what you eat or drink it can take 2 to 8 hours to empty your stomach (more in some situations). During general anesthesia you lose the reflexes (like gagging and coughing) that normally protect your airway and it becomes much easier to aspirate gastric contents. If that happens, the combination of stomach acid and chunks of food can cause a nasty aspiration pneumonia. This can be life threatening, as was dramatized in the movie The Verdict. Most cases aren’t as bad as that fictional one, but
For anyone else reading this, TedW has it exactly right. General anaesthesia typically involves both a drug to put you to sleep, and a drug to paralyze you temporarily so that a ventilation tube can be placed into your lungs. While paralyzed (or even if just well and truly asleep from the first drug), you are unable to prevent your stomach contents from leaking backwards into your esophagus. This has nothing to do with nausea or vomiting — it’s caused by relaxation of the sphincter between your esophagus and your stomach. If you go into surgery with a stomach full of toast, that ball of food+stomach acid can wash up into your throat and get aspirated into your lungs, which tend to react exactly like you’d imagine delicate tissue would if you toss a bucket of acid on it. The risk of aspiration is higher if you are pregnant (unaccustomed pressure on your abdomen due to fetus/weight gain, as well as a general tendency of all your tissues to stretch and relax, making it harder for the eso
